Atul Gawande is a Boston-based surgeon, who also teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
Bengaluru: Surgeon and author Atul Gawande has been named chief executive of a venture between Amazon, J.P. Morgan Chase and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway aimed at shaking up US employee healthcare.
Gawande works in general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
He is also the executive director of the health systems innovation centre, Ariadne Labs, which he founded.
The three companies announced their partnership earlier this year, saying they wanted to find a way to cut healthcare costs and improve services for their US employees.
Gawande was selected among 10 candidates, each of whom wrote a paper on how they would fix the US medical system.
However, there have been no specific plans announced yet for how the new organisation aims to change the state of existing healthcare in the US.
Gawande ‘thrilled’
Gawande will not give up his positions at Ariadne Labs (where he is set to become the chairman), at Harvard as well as at Brigham and Women’s Hospitalin Boston. He will also continue to write for The New Yorker.
“I’m thrilled to be named CEO of this healthcare initiative,” said Gawande in his official press release.
“I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world,” he added.
Gawande has been a prominent voice in policy making, having written extensively about it in The New Yorker. He has also authored four books so far — all of which figured in the NYT bestseller list.
Writing career started in 1995
Brooklyn-born Gawande first came to the limelight when he started writing for Slate, an online magazine, after his graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1995. The New Yorker took note of his writings and made him a staff writer in 1998. Nearly 10 years later, one of his essays caught the attention of fellow Harvard alumni and then-President Barack Obama.
In it, he had compared two towns in Texas and put forth arguments about why the healthcare costs were high in one while low in the other. The article reportedly “affected Obama’s thinking drastically”.
Gawande is no stranger to politics either. After his undergraduate degree in biology and political science from Stanford, he joined Al Gore’s presidential campaign as a health researcher in 1988. Four years later, he joined Bill Clinton’s campaign, going on to become a director in the Clinton Healthcare Task Force.
Held position at WHO
Gawande was appointed the director of the World Health Organization’s Global Patient Safety Challenge, which aims to reduce the number of deaths occurring in surgery.
He has also written about quality and cost of health services in the armed forces, delivered lectures all over the world on surgery, and has several awards in his kitty, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for his work investigating surgery ethics with “a critical eye and fresh perspective”.
“Now I have the backing of these remarkable organisations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all,” added Gawande in his official statement.
“This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible,” he said.
The joint venture was first announced by Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in January this year to address the problem rising healthcare costs.
Gawande’s stint as the CEO of this new venture, to be headquartered in Boston, begins on 9 July 2018.